


oceans 3 (and also a spaceship)

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Heist, Minor Violence, Mutiny, Octokittens - Freeform, Polyamory, Space PowerPoints, author absolutely making shit up as they go along
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:29:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26186443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: “Your lack of faith continues to astound me,” Raphaella scoffs. “He can’t take all three of us. I can fly!”This fact has already been established, due to the fourth slide of Raphaella’s Space PowerPoint, which is just a clipart image of a pair of wings with the words I CAN FLY in enormous font. Nastya’s still not convinced. “Guns can shoot up, you know.”(Mechs Femslash Week Day 6 - Rebellion)
Relationships: Ivy Alexandria/Raphaella la Cognizi/Nastya Rasputina, The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina
Comments: 13
Kudos: 81
Collections: Mechanisms Femslash Week 2020





	oceans 3 (and also a spaceship)

“Nastya. What’s your question?”

Nastya ducks her head to avoid Raphaella’s laser pointer shining in her eyes, because that’s the kind of presenter Raph is. “What is the backup plan for when Jonny inevitably murders us all and retakes the bridge?”

“Your lack of faith continues to astound me,” Raphaella scoffs. “He can’t take all three of us. I can  _ fly!” _

This fact has already been established, due to the fourth slide of Raphaella’s Space PowerPoint, which is just a clipart image of a pair of wings with the words I CAN FLY in enormous font. Nastya’s still not convinced. “Guns  _ can  _ shoot up, you know.”

Ivy nudges Nastya with an elbow. “That’s why you’re covering for us! Jonny’s rubbish aim should give you enough time to take him out, or at least talk him down before he can kill us. But if you had been paying attention to slide twenty-seven, you would’ve seen that there’s only a sixteen percent chance of Jonny interfering in the first place!”

As much as Nastya respected Ivy’s calculations, she knew Jonny better than the archivist ever would, and she knew that he had a sixth sense for nonsense. “I’ll do it, but when we all wake up with holes in our heads, you owe me a gold bar each.”

“Done.” Raphaella flicks off her laser pointer and flares her feathers like a bird of paradise. “Let’s gear up, then. Ivy?”

Withdrawing her hands from the oozing tentacles of the octokitten that’s been on her lap throughout the entire meeting, Ivy hops to her feet and starts rifling through the sack on the table in front of herself. “Earpieces,” she starts, passing them out to Nastya and Raphaella and settling one in her own ear. “Syncing now.”

Nastya and Raphaella both cringe as feedback relays between the three units. “Zap launchers,” Ivy adds, handing them each a tool that looks more like a rubber band gun than a real weapon. The crackling of electricity coming from the insides of them, however, gives them a marginally more threatening air. “Octokittens.”

“Octokittens?” Nastya asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Every coup d’état needs a mascot.”

Raphaella, on the other hand, takes her octokitten without question. Its tentacles reach out to wrap around her neck for security as it nuzzles her face. “Do you both know your positions? I can pull up the map again if—”

“Please, I’ve seen enough slides,” Nastya begs. As exasperated as she is, she still leans over to kiss Raphaella on the cheek when the scientist pouts up at her. “And I know Aurora better than either of you ever will, so don’t worry about me. Aurora?” A symphony of electrical hums answers her from the ceiling of the lab, which apparently means something to Nastya, because she answers it in hushed Cyberian. Ivy and Raphaella just shrug at each other.

With their plans laid out and their weapons ready, the three women leave the lab and take off to the far corners of the ship. Ivy, generally the least threatening of the three, heads for the bridge with her zap launcher hidden in the folds of her skirt, whispering to her octokitten as she walks. “I wonder whether Brian will notice,” she muses, scratching her passenger between the ears. Its enthusiastic purring sounds a bit too wet to be healthy, if it weren’t a semi-aquatic abomination. “He can be hard to predict, if past interactions are anything to go by. I’m not too worried about him killing me horribly, though.”

The octokitten responds with a garbled meow and sticks a damp tentacle in Ivy’s ear.

Inside the Aurora’s vents, Nastya struggles to crawl with her octokitten plastered to her face. “Aurora, love, can you get this thing  _ off  _ of me?”

**I am under strict directions from Archivist Ivy to leave the octokittens unharmed.**

Nastya grits her teeth. “Since when do you listen to Ivy over  _ me?” _

**Ivy is more committed to The Plan than you are.**

“The things I do for you,” Nastya grumbles, peeling suction cups off her face only for them to reattach to her neck.

In Aurora’s massive server room, Raphaella flits around terminals and stacks of hard drives with careless ease. Her octokitten hisses every time her wings beat too close to it, but it still refuses to crawl down from the top of her head. “D-34, D-34,” Raphaella chants under her breath as she reads the labels plastered on each monitor. One of her hands holds a glowing purple datastick, which she flips between her fingers continuously as she flies. “There!” Spotting the right server, she drops down between them and plugs in the datastick, casting a look over her shoulder to make sure no one snuck in behind her while she was flying too loudly to notice.

Back on the bridge, Ivy sits backwards in the co-pilot’s chair and watches Brian adjust the control panel with the precision only a robot can muster. “Remind me what you’re doing here again?” he asks, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m just checking in with you,” she bluffs. Ivy may be the least threatening of the team, but she’s not the best actor by any means. “I mean, that planet with all the—the robot flowers? Y’know, the ones that screamed every time you touched them? That must’ve been stressful for you. With all your, uh. Roses.”

Brian finally turns to look at her head-on, his brow furrowed. “I’m fairly secure in the well-being of my garden. Are  _ you  _ okay?”

With the full weight of his gaze on her, Ivy can’t help but blush. “Of course! Why wouldn’t I be? I mean, I got this  _ delightful  _ toy from my girlfriend—” she pulls the zap launcher out of her skirt and notes with satisfaction that Brian hardly tenses “—and now I get to use it!”

It’s not the fastest weapon in the Aurora’s arsenal, but it’s fast enough, and Brian doesn’t have time to react before the tiny electrified net wraps around his face and sends surprisingly powerful shocks radiating down his neck, rendering him motionless. Ivy allows herself a moment to celebrate her success before gently pushing the pilot’s chair back and stepping between Brian and the control panel. “Alright, Aurora, I’m going to need your help finding this.”

As Nastya predicted, Jonny is attracted to the scent of mischief like a space bloodhound. He comes sniffing down the hallway only minutes after Ivy disappears onto the bridge, his holster crooked and his eyeliner smeared as if he didn’t have time to finish applying it before he caught the trail of insubordination. “Nice try,” Nastya whispers to herself as she opens the panel between them and drops out of the vents between Jonny and the bridge. “Where are you going?”

Jonny shrieks and jumps back, one hand going to his gun. Thankfully, his aim is even worse than normal when he’s startled, so he only manages to dent a couple of ceiling panels before he gets a hold of his trigger finger and scowls at Nastya instead. “What the fuck do you care?”

“I wouldn’t,” Nastya blusters, “except it’s eight in the morning ship time, and you haven’t even finished your makeup. Plus, I know Tim drank you  _ literally  _ under the table last night. So you have some reason for sprinting around the ship, guns blazing, and I’d like to know what it is.”

His frown only deepens. “None of your business, is what it is. Let me through.” He re-holsters his gun and tries to push past Nastya, only for her to catch him with an arm around his waist and hold him in place. It’s almost comical to watch him fight her steel grip. “Let me  _ go!” _

“Nope.”

“Why do you have an octokitten on your head.”

“Science,” she replies, which is tangentially related to the truth.

Before Jonny can question her any further, a loud sizzle comes from the door to the bridge, followed by a dull metallic  _ thunk.  _ His eyes go wide. “What is—what are you doing to Brian? Is this a fucking  _ mutiny?” _

“Yes.” Raphaella’s voice precedes her as she turns the corner and sprints down the corridor toward them, pushed along by gently flapping wings. “What are you going to do about it?”

He draws his gun again, but doesn’t have time to fire even a warning shot before Nastya hits him in the side of the head with her fist, and he crumples to the ground. As much as she resents her mechanism, Nastya never gets tired of knocking people out by sheer virtue of having heavy hands. “I told you,” she admonishes Raphaella as the scientist kicks Jonny’s limp body to one side of the hallway. “If you had just listened to—”

“You were sent to distract him, and you did a great job. I don’t see a flaw in this plan. Now, can we get moving and check on Ivy?” She bounces from one foot to the other, holding the purple datastick in one hand and cradling her octokitten in the other.

They step onto the bridge together, to find Brian’s body sparking half-heartedly in the pilot’s seat, while Ivy roots through the control panel and fires off questions at Aurora every so often. Outside the massive observation window, stars fly by in a meaningless pattern of color. “I have the program,” Raphaella announces, leaving Nastya in the dust and flying to Ivy’s side. “Are you ready for it?”

“Aurora?” Ivy prompts.

The small screen hanging over the control panel glows green, before a string of text scrolls across it.  **I believe that you have the correct port. I believe.**

“Are you certain, love?” Nastya asks, unnerved by anything less than factuality in her girlfriend’s speech.

**Yes. Upload it. Please.**

As soon as she catches up to the others, Nastya brushes a strand of hair out of her face and leans down to kiss the control panel. “Be safe, alright?”

The control panel makes a sound halfway between a chuckle and a whir, and then Ivy plugs in the datastick, and Aurora goes silent. Pulses of light travel between keys and switches, finally forming a giant circle that swirls in the universal symbol for buffering. Nastya loves many things about her girlfriend, but user interface is not necessarily high on that list. “Now we wait,” says Ivy as she steps away from the controls.

“Wait for what?”

At the sound of a new voice, all three of them freeze. “Nothing,” Raphaella answers, way too fast to be convincing.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.” When they turn around, Ashes is watching them with a smug smile on their face and a cigarette hanging from one corner of their mouth. “Looks like quite a Thing, as a matter of fact.”

Ivy clears her throat. “Look, we can explain—it’s—Brian and Jonny are both fine, we just—”

“It’s the Aurora’s birthday, yeah?”

That cuts Ivy off, and she turns to Nastya for help. The engineer steps forward. “What’s it to you?”

Ashes regards her for a long moment, studying her hands jammed in her coat pockets and her hair falling out of a tight ponytail. “Depends on how we’ve decided to celebrate.”

Unbeknownst to the heist team, Aurora finishes downloading the program and announces her success with a loud  _ ding.  _ And then with words. “Good morning, Quartermaster Ashes! Please refrain from smoking on the bridge!”

Silence fills the space between the four of them, even as Brian starts sparking faster and then stirs in his seat. “You… gave her a voice,” Ashes says flatly.

“I have always been able to speak! Now I can speak out loud! In human language! And none of you will be able to ignore me!”

Outside the bridge, Jonny groans. “What the fuck is that noise?”

“It is me, Fucking First Mate Jonny! I can talk now!” Aurora’s growing more chipper by the second, and every face in the room is beginning to fall, except for Nastya’s. She stares down at Ashes with a devilish smile, daring them to complain. “My wonderful incredible very sweet blue lovely viola beautiful sexy human machine Nastya girlfriend gave me a voice! For my birthday!”

“I thought this would be fun,” Raphaella murmurs to Ivy. “We were just going to do something  _ nice  _ for our sentient home, make our girlfriends happy, all that, and now she’s going to  _ haunt our every waking moment for eternity.” _

Aurora laughs, though apparently that hasn’t been programmed into her new voice, because it comes out more static than sound. “I am not a ghost! I do not haunt! However, if you are interested in ghosts, I have many stories to tell you about past passengers! Once upon a time in space…”

It takes three days for her to finish her first story, and by then everyone except Nastya is ready to tear Aurora’s programming apart wire by wire, not that they dare face Nastya’s wrath. Secretly, Ivy and Raphaella begin planning a counter-heist.

Nastya has the time of her life.

**Author's Note:**

> I forced myself to write something fun and happy today after making myself Really Really Sad twice this week ghdkflhag. I have no idea if this makes any sense because I'm too tired to edit, but hopefully there's some entertaining enough content sprinkled in to keep everyone happy?? Who knows. My self-confidence is a bit shot today because capitalism so I apologize for rambling here.
> 
> Comments and kudos water my crops, and by my crops I really just mean the one basil plant on the front porch that my mom obsesses over, but it's given us some good pesto so I deeply appreciate your support. Find me on tumblr @alderations and twitter @alderwrites!


End file.
